Hello everybody

 

Long time reader, first time poster. I have sort of a luxury problem but nevertheless it keeps bugging me so I wanted to see if someone can hint me in the right direction.

 

I do mainly short to medium hops in the alps / mediterrean area with my majestic dash during ASN / REX weather and since I am doing great on the FPS-Side (35 - 50 FPS) and on the VAS-Side (never even got near the ping of death lately, eg. 1.5 GB of VAS to spare). This I do with photo tapestry underneath me from various sources (MSE, CH PRO X, France VFR) which gives me something nice to look at while at cruise level.

 

So by looking forward the peaks of the alps look very blurry whereas the scenery underneath and behind me is very sharp. But giving the nature of my cockpit I tend to look forward and very seldom behind me. As I understand, P3D has some LOD-Limitations, at least v2.2 had, and I am not sure if it is still the case.

 

But, and here is my question: Is there any way of improving the distance view with photreal terrain, may it be by upgrading the hardware or the software. I am trying to find the bottleneck here, if there is any and I am willing to throw a bit of money at it, to make it go away. But as stated, I still have FPS and VAS to spare and would give that in for some faster and more distant texture loading.

 

On the Hardware-side-of-things, I run a smooth 4790K @ 4.5 Ghz, that spikes in the yellow from time to time, a GTX 770 with 4GB, that seems not very busy when monitored (40 to 50 %). I keep my P3D on a separate Samsung SSD and my photosceneries on an external USB 3.0 HDD.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Chris

 

 

 

Some claim extending the LOD past 6.5 works, some don't, but you can try a higher number and see for yourself. Otherwise there is nothing you can do apart from zooming the view out, which helps to sharpen everything up. Mountain terrain naturally makes it look worse, as its throwing the textures up in front of your face, even if they are quite distant.

Following a weekend of research into the LOD Radius limitation of 6.5, I am convinced that increasing the value above 6.5 does absolutely nothing.  There are discussions about this topic here and elsewhere (including the Prepar3D forums), and the majority consensus of the threads that I read indicate the limitation of 6.5.  I hope LM addresses this issue in future releases so that we can finally make photoscenery in P3D as sharp as it was in FSX (using an LOD radius of 8.5 or 9.5, if you're hardware would support it).  I believe that some are using a lower zoom factor (e.g., 0.4 instead of 1.0) which does create the appearance of sharper textures, but also creates a "fisheye" distortion and an unrealistic perception of speed in the outside views.

 

Gerald

Thanks for your inputs. It seems I must have missed the whole LOD Discussion. Unfortunately, that seems to be an in-sim-limitation I cannot overcome by throwing hardware or tweaks at it, then. 

 

I assume that the point could be proven by setting LOD radius to a ridiculous high number within a photo scenery and end up with an instant OOM?